Documents are created widely in enterprises using commercial word processors in tool suites like Microsoft Office® word processing software, Lotus Symphony™ word processing software, and OpenOffice.org® word processing software. However, once created, it is very difficult to reuse content from these documents despite significant progress made in keyword searching and social tagging. Microsoft Office® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and other countries. OpenOffice.org® is a registered trademark of Oracle America, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
A promising approach to retrieve content is semantic search, where documents are queried based on a formal representation of the domain concepts inherent in those documents and their possible relations. Similarly, to build high-quality information systems, the trend is to use Model-driven Architecture and Design (MDA/MDD), wherein concepts of the domain are captured as models and used at every stage of development to keep the system implementation on track. For these and other applications, it is important to have detailed domain models.
However, building the models from scratch is time-consuming and cumbersome. A bottleneck issue is the availability of qualified domain experts. In enterprise settings, it is quite common to have large development projects spread across multiple locations and spanning months and many teams. Different teams are engaged in complementary activities for the project and create different types of documentation as output. Over time, the participants become experts in domain concept(s) corresponding to the activities they were engaged in. However, for a complicated domain, no single person may be the authoritative expert.